Word Length Andword Frequency

Since the appearance of Zipf’s works, (esp. Zipf 1932, 1935), his hypothesis “that the magnitude of words tends, on the whole, to stand in an inverse (not necessarily proportionate) relationship to the number of occurrences” (1935: 25) has been generally accepted. Zipf illustrated the relation between word length and frequency of word occurrence using German data, namely the frequency dictionary of Kaeding (1897–98). In the past century, Zipf’s idea has been repeatedly taken up and examined with regard to specific problems. Surveying the pertinent work associated with this hypothesis, one cannot avoid the impression that there are quite a number of problemswhich have not been solved to date.Mainly, this seems to be due to the fact that the fundamentals of the different approaches involved have not been systematically scrutinized. Some of these unsolved problems can be captured in the following points: